Italian glass designer Fulvio Bianconi was born in 1915 in Padua. He began his career as an apprentice in the Murano glass furnaces under the direction of Michael Pinto and worked with a variety of Milan’s publishers - including Mondadori, Bompiani, and Garzanti - as an illustrator and graphic designer and frescoed the Galtrucco shops and Trade Fair pavilions.
In 1946 he travelled many times to Murano to learn more about the art of glassmaking. Here he met Paolo Venini who, sensing the creative spirit of the young Bianconi, invited him to collaborate with his glassworks Venini, a pioneer of 20th-century glass production. During his extensive collaboration over several years with Venini, Bianconi created strikingly coloured, simply shaped, often organically inspired objets d’art, vases, as well as lighting, such as the alluringly biomorphic Fazzoletto series (1948) and the multicolored Pezzati vases (1950), which call to mind abstract paintings.
New workmanship techniques of the glassmaking art and revision of the age-old ones were the subject of the creative research of Fulvio Bianconi. Moulding movement and colour into his glass pieces, Fulvio Bianconi established a totally up-to-date link with the history of Murano.
Bianoconi’s midcentury work is included in numerous prestigious collections, including Indianapolis Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; the Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and, in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; and Corning Museum of Glass.
Bianconi passed away in 1996.